Fred, I sometimes think we need to appoint you as a Goodwill Ambassador to represent the sport of owning/driving T-Buckets. Your enthusiasm is a great thing.
Seeing you around again is pretty great too. Welcome back!
...I'm back in Vegas looking for work
Uh-oh, I don't like the sound of that. Aren't they now saying NV leads the nation in unemployment?
Jobs are scarce as hen's teeth. Here where I stay, in Lafayette, IN, we're really little more than a town that grew alongside a river so farmers could float their harvest to market. Then, suddenly, factories started appearing. Anyone old enough to remember National Homes, when they did pre-fab housing? That plant is now Wabash National Trailers and if you've never seen a Wabash trailer, you've never driven the highways of this country. Alcoa Aluminum is here, Subaru is here, Caterpillar is here, a division of TRW is here, Tate & Lyle is here, etc. And they have all laid off workers over the last 2-3 years. A McDonald's over in West Lafayette, fairly close to the Purdue campus, stuck a now hiring sign in their window and took it down after only a couple hours. They had received over 200 applications. And the average age of the applicants? 43 years old. So now, the teens are griping they can't find summer jobs and the students gripe they can't find jobs, because adults are taking whatever they can get.
And try as I might, I cannot see how we turn this ship around. Until the consumer has disposable dollars in his pocket again, businesses are going to continue suffering. And closing. Things like NAFTA and CAFTA have stripped incredible amounts of manufacturing away from the American worker and I don't see a way to put that toothpaste back into the tube either. I think there are a couple of members up in the Region (if you don't know what the Region is, you'll never qualify to be a Region Rat. :winkn
and they can tell you what all the steel mills look like - ghost towns. Imagine what that does for the tax base. We could renege on both trade agreements and start imposing huge tariffs on all imported products, but that is only going to get China's back in the air. And it seems that dragon is already starting to become a problem for the U.S. anyway.
Oh. Wait. I just realized I am preaching to the choir...
Sorry.
ilot:
